Switzerland: Silly cows and flowers in my hair

Switzerland. Magic. After 8 weeks of working and getting sick and losing walking ability TWICE I was pretty ready for a holiday.I had a heroic mission to Norway in the back of my mind but Norway is far and expensive (expensive because it is far and expensive because it is Norway). So I thought a little sojourn to Switzerland would be a fabulous expedition. It seems all very romantic, you know, hanging in the Alps, going hiking, yodeling and talking to the cows while all matter of cheeses flower from my fingers to my mouth. And little wooden houses and waterfalls and all things ideallyic. Well what’s funny about some postcard dreams is that sometimes they are real. Switzerland is what people think it is, well i don’t know about the whole country for I stayed in one small part of it but it was full of wooden houses with red and white flowers in flower boxes, green rolling mountains and cows in the fields. So many cows in the fields, well actually so many cows in the mountains and they are all given a heroic bell to wear around their neck so when one is hiking in the mountains, or sleeping in the mountains or just hanging around in general there is always a symphony of cow bells in the distance, sometimes a gentle ringing, sometimes a clanging mess. Proof that cows never sleep and only eat for the bells never stop ringing (Gotta keep those 4 stomachs full!- what a job!).

I know there MUST have been a farmer once who had a musical ear and gave all his cows a bell with a different note and devoted his life’s work to creating the most beautiful symphony with his cows, teaching them when to play and when to stop, they learned to eat their grass in a rhythm and the music manifested in the souls of the cows so their milk was the finest in all of Switzerland and when people drank it they could hear the singing in the hills. Well at least that is what I imagine happening, because up in those mountains with one farmer and his 12 cows there is a strange magic one can feel dancing down the hills...

Oh the delights of where I was! Apparently the weather had been weird this year in Switzerland and the summer had not been a proper summer (yes i know the world is exploding slowly, surely all over the place) but when i arrived it was just buckets of sun raining from the sky with an occasional dramatic thunderstorm. So we went hiking up to the glacier and had a picnic watching the cows (and one has no idea how they made it so high up there with you) and we bathed in a glacier lake which sounds romantic if not horrifically cold but invigorating and enlightening and alive-making! And then I was taken to a metal cart thing on top of another mountain (which we took a chairlift to) and this was basically a track and you sit in a cart and it’s like a rollercoster on top of the mountain, amazing views at a pretty silly speed and the cows gently give you a look that means “humans are like, so weird man..”

And then to get down the mountain it is only natural that you would get on a mountain scooter which is similar to one of those children’s scooters but it has mountain tires on it and you can ride down a mountain at a mad speed and really hurt yourself if you wanted to. Fantastic!

As for my friend Phil (from my education class who i was visiting) he procurred himself a job in Zurich and he left me saying “Here Mary, have a bed, some food and a bunch of friends and oh there’s mountains outside if you need one or two or 70” So saddened by his departure I was invited to go to the Palace pool which is a very fancy place but apparently the cost to lie next to a pool was 20 franks and im sorry but for R200 one can do a million more things than lie next to a pool for a day so i declined (feeling a little bit like a stingy weirdo) and walked into a guy who was playing guitar and we had a sing a long and he pulled out his slackline and while trying to walk along it he said “you want to come sleep on the mountain tonight?” and i said yes..

So a few hours later I was hiking up this mad steep mountain with a Canadian and Dutchman who were avid climbers and had been spending their summer literally ascending anything they could get their hands on. Needless to say i didn’t keep up to their pace for very long and i huffingly puffingly dragged myself up this steep mountain for a few hours as the sun descended and the moon rose, full, in all it’s glory. We crossed lakes and rocks and hills and the village decreased in view where people became ant sized and then faded into nothing like nothing else existed, just the mountain and us and the moon. And then we were on the top and there was a rock and they said “put on your climbing harness we are going to climb this rock” and i didn’t ask many questions, the moon was full, it was midnight, i was exhausted but ok with a bit of a climb.

Well this “little climb” was probably the most fearsome awesome insane thing i have done in my existence so far. It was all very well and a little scary and a little steep and then all of a sudden we were climbing up metal rungs up a cliff, up up up, it was just little me on a vertical rock attached somewhat precariously to a metal wire but no way would i say safely attachment because you had to detach yourself to attach yourself to the next pit hanging with one hand on a cliff (Attaching and detaching is always a bit of a tricky business) There were parts that it wasn’t simply a ladder but it was a rock grip that you had to find and a little jump and a stretch. My heart, my adrenaline. It took another hour, or more, of constant fear, the adrenaline pushed me to the top, the tears began to fall, i was so scared, i wanted to go home i wanted to go to bed, i wanted my parents and my friends and Llandudno beach and chocolate and all those good things, i didn’t want to fall down a rock, there were overhands and even though my muscles were dead my fear pushed me through for, once we had gone so far there was no turning back and only at the top would there be peace again. Biting back tears i climbed and climbed until. The top. The glorious top and the world. The moon lit up the entire world, it was mountain and mountain and valley and joy and beauty and cliffs that we had climbed up, we were on a piece of rock and the world was ours. What insanity, what joy, what an ecstatic victory.

Then there was a campfire on the top of the world, some good conversation, some chocolate and finally a sleeping bag and perhaps 3 hours of rest before the sun began to rise in the most magnifcient glory i have been a part of . The light lit up the sky in all manners of colours imaginable and i was so tired but i couldn’t stop staring at all the wonder around me, the gentle harshness of the morning, where i was, and how i had got there.

We hiked back the gentle back route (yes there WAS one of those) and walked our way down and exhausted i arrived back where i started and went to sleep for 6 hours. Holidays. What holy days.

And then i moved to a new set up, a man in a not-very swiss house by a river. And he told me stories about when he was a ski instructor in Aspen and he worked for rich people who would hire out a private bowl for the day so that they could have it for only them and they would take a snowcat up, him and maybe 6 other peopel and spend the day playing on fresh lines with no one to ruin it but them.

Oh that river was LOUD, it rushed and rushed and made such a noise and i spent something like 3 days sitting next to it, feeling like i was active because that river did all my activity for me. I found a guitar to play and lay on the grass, soaking in all the goodness that Switzerland could give me. Hitching around to places i wanted to go at night and lazily walking around rivers in the day with a ukelele and a sarong to sleep on.

And then it ended, as these things do and Italy and the call of money came. And Switzerland being the fantastically safe country it is (too safe i fear, i think that’s why people kill themselves all the time, life is just too easy) it seemed only to make sense to hitch over the border because in Italy trains are cheap and in Swizerland trains are insanely expensive and to get to Italy the old fashioned way I probably would have spent something like 100 euros. As it is, i spent none.

Oh it was beautiul and i did not get pictures becuase i think i was too focused on living itself than recording the living. Though now of course i wish i had. And only in Switzerland were the main people who gave me a lift women. In other countries you re lucky to get lifts by men and if it is a woman it is rare they will pick you. The first couple of lifts were French and we did lots of smiling and shrugging at each other and then there was a French man who convinced me that maybe i do want children one day. He was a pilot and was telling me all sorts of stories about when he went to Namibia to try tp get a job but met 2 English guys and Korean girl and soon he was road tripping Namibia and never found a job. And then i was waiting near the border of Italy and Switzerland and all these cars were rushing past me it was a terrible place to hitch because everyone was actually going to France (Verbier) and not Italy and this old old old woman stopped, the wrinkles on her face had wrinkles on them and she had crutches jammed on the front seat but she was stopping for me and yes she loved traveling and 50 years ago her and her husband took a boat to Australia because they thought they might move there but she didn’t like that the stones were too new, she missed the old stones, the old buildings in Europe, so she came home so she could feel the spirit of the old stones of Europe. I think i see what she means, i am not attached to the old walls of Europe because that was not what i have learned to appreciate in a country but if it had always been there perhaps i would miss the age around me.

And then just before St Bernard’s pass, the most magical mountains that take you to the very top and then they say ITALIA and then you spiral down into Italy winding winding winding through talls and shorts and hikers and rocks and. Well just then a women picked me up and I got in. And i fell asleep and i woke up in Turin, which is where she was going, made my way (sweatily, the heat away from the Alps i s monstrous) to a hostel, to an Australian girl who shared her wine and her supper and made my way driftily happily, gently to sleep.

For the love of a moose!

I am sitting in a hostel in Turin, it is hot, it is stifling, i am about to have my second cold shower in half an hour. But i cannot steer away from the fact that i am so grateful to be here right now, for all the events and things that brought me to be in this place, at this time with so many things to look forward to and back to, that i love the heat for the heat is here and here is nowhere in a sense but in another it is everywhere.

I was writing abut exhaustion last time i wrote. That exhaustion reached a plateua where the fact that i was working all day every day just become a fact and not something to worry about. I knew the people i worked with and the way they worked, I knew the hotel, I knew the deal. In a sense it was peaceful. Well besides the fact that shortly after I wrote last a new disaster struck. I was standing on a balcony, all dressed up to go to the Friday night disco with the children and I shouted

“There was a great big moose”( using my hands as moose horns of course)

They screamed back from below “There was a great big moose!”

“And he drank a lot of Juice!!”

“and he drank a lot of juice” they screamed happily back.

In my excitement of my favourite part of the song (Way-yo, Way yo way yo way yo way yo) I jumped off the chair, landed strangely on my ankle and in tears I called for ice and the next day i was on crutches for 5 days. It was tough, there were only 3 tutors the last week as we had a lot less children and trying to carry things, crutching around, and work at an active camp was painful. This was also added to the fact that the children were obsessed with my crutches so every time i wante do move somewhere i looked around and the crutches were attached to an energetic 6 year old who had incited an older child to make them short enough for her. I enjoyed their revelry so most of the time i did the hop and swing arms for momentum thing and resorted to hand stand walking which as cool as it sounds- isn’t so practical. Luckily, my foot healed fast and I still have an absolute love for the Moose song (For he just drank SO much juice!)

And then it was the Friday night disco again, I was walking somewhat unsteadily but i had 2 feet that transported me (How often do we take such precious things for granted?). I had the week off and was intending on visiting a friend in Switzerland when a strange blonde lady approached me and said “We need people to work for us next week...”

Without asking many questions, I said yes and the next day I watched my children's show around 2pm and whisked myself 200 m down the road to another hotel, another company, another ideology, awaiting children who arrived at 5pm. I was exhausted but happy to be somewhere else doing something different and obviously, being paid. Here we did not sing the moose song or any song in the morning, i did not have to run around and play games and make the children dance on their head. It was very composed, if i wanted the kids to do book work for 2 hours that was no problem. But the show at the end of the week was of utmost importace, I didn’t really understand the power sturcture there but it was myself and one other guy on a summer camp with 30 children (the week before we had been 3 tutors with 18 children) and every night we had group dances (Lady Gaga, Katie Perry, Danza Kuduro and the like) and during lessons in the day all my co worker wanted to do (as he was head honcho at the place) was make an amazing show to impress the parents. As i had mistakenly stolen a friends Beauty and the Beast dvd at the beginning of the summer he decided we should do a whole production of songs and acting of Beauty and the Beast with Italian children. Wow. So he spent time writing the script with the older children, acting, show rehearsng and i was told to teach 8 year olds songs like Tale as old as time, Gaston, kill the Beast and Be Our Guest and with the amount of “listen and repeat” i had to do I was near throttling someone. During lessons these poor kids just had to learn songs and i must say they had brave hearts for the complaining was not as i would have expected. They dealt with the tedium while i was all the while thinking how it was unfair that jsut ebcause parents need to be impressed we need to give children a rough bucket of tedium...

Nevertheless, the show was amazing, ridiuclously amazing, i was impressed with the children and begrudgingly impressed with my coworker for the kind o show that was organised in one week with Italian children but i coulnd’t help feeling out of my depth and somewhat pleased to return to a place where i really know what’s going on.

So i was whisked finally, after 4 weeks of working every single day, every single night and pretty much all the time to a day camp. To the normality of working hours like 8 – 4.30. Imagine. I was shuffled into the most kind, caring Italian family, they did not speak English and the mother was mad about chatting about this and about that, she could talk about anything that came to her mind for hours, food, weather, fashion and with all her chattering away I got the chance to not feel awkward about listening and understanding and trying to reply in Italian. The father was equally cool in a different way. Actually seriously cool. He owned a room which he called his cave, downstairs, musty and dark absolutely full, top to floor, head to foot, side to side of records and cds of quality music. He had been collecting music for 30 years and it’s a haven of interesting music which he can explain the history of all of them. I didn’t always understand beause when he saw i had an interest in this he took me for a little session down in the cave, showing me his turntables and how they work and linking songs for radio but when he saw i was interested he got more and more excited so he spoke too fast and i couldn’t keep up. His enthusiasm was infectious though and without me asking he made me an mp3 cd of all the pink floyd music he owns (which is everything there is, vinyls and cds).

And then i stepped on a stone. A rather big stone. And being Mary I took no notice of it and continued with my life. And then i did not clean the gauge in my foot and then it got infected and it was blue and pussy and disgusting and i was limping and trying to clean and pin it out but was too squeamish to do so properly. So the family decided i couldn’t go on in this fashion so they took me to their friend the surgeon who did a house job and while his 10 year old son handed him various metal tortue devices i watched as he cut my foot open, talking abotu guitar and south africa and other exciting things. He said he didn’t need payment as it was “for Africa” and gave me some antiseptic and some cool surgeon plasters. And then I had tonsilitis and i couldn’t swallow my spit for a couple days (horrendously uncomfortable) and the family took me the following day to another doctor who wrote me a prescription for antibiotices, said he didn’t want payment either (Africans huh) and while i was taken to watch the final Harry Potter in Italian that night my italian parents went out and bought my medicine.

Ah being taken care for the Italian way. Such a level. I got quite a talking to though about not wearing shows (I have never been told off in another language besides English) and swinging in thunderstorms which is what they attributed my tonsilitis to- which i completely didn’t agree with but i humbly accepted the reprimands and the caring that went with it.

The antibiotices improved my disease so fast that by the last evening i stayed with them i went out with the other tutors for a farewell drink and we drank R15 prosecco in the park and giggled about silly things and the next day i awoke at 6am, to find my adopted Italian father ready and waiting to take me to another train station to to take me to another train station which would take me to Swizterland and the holy days of holiday after 8 weeks of continous madness.

We are Young and Free!!!

I am lying in my hotel bedroom. It is Friday, I have been here for 2 weeks and I am staying for a third. Children are screaming outside as I turn the music louder, trying to drown them out. However, this seems impossible. They are playing a game called Safari where they have to capture and drag a tutor who is some sort of animal to the judges to get points. It gets brutal, it is Friday I am tired, I am happy that at this moment I do not have to be a safari animal and have children drag and pull me across the garden so that they will win another game.

Competition. Italian children. It never fails.

No but I’m lying. I am not tired. Tired means that you need to go to bed and sleep and you will be ok tomorrow. Tired is an emotion that I have long since passed. Now, I am actually swimming in the deep realms of exhaustion. I have not seen my Mary energy in days, I have been walking in what seems like a flutter of dream-like images past children, talking to children, teaching, dancing, singing and functioning on an energy that is not my own but I must have borrowed from another reserve from some other place..

There are 2 types of camps in Italy. At the city camps we work very respectable hours from 9am to 5pm with some short breaks in between and live in host families where we are fed and cared for. We can sleep and they take us on nice exploratory evening adventures. Then there is the other kettle of fish (on a side note: has anyone ever really seen a kettle of fish?) a summer camp. Summer camp assimilates a sort of every-waking-minute commitment. There is no such thing as an evening off and there is no such thing as a weekend. The children arrive at around 9am on Sunday morning and from then we have lessons, arranged activities, lunch, supper, breakfast, night duty (making sure they actually go to sleep) until Saturday afternoon where we plan the next week and go to sleep until the children arrive again on Sunday. All their time is taken up by us and thus, all our time is taken up by them.

In a peaceful life I am a very good sleeper. I lie in bed and think a little, enjoying my thoughts slowly whirling around my head before I settle into the crazy thought mode and fall gently into sleep. But here my mind is full of repetitive songs like “I’m a little teapot”, lesson plans for the following day, the things the children said, how to make thirteen year olds excited, and how I cannot sleep when there are three people in my bedroom. These thoughts whirl and twirl for at least an hour every night and awake at anew exhausted level the following day.

Exhaustion. This is a place I have never idled at for this long.

Oh but it is always interesting, I cannot ever say that I come close to the painful disease of boredom. In fact, it is fun. We had a talent show last night and many children performed. Karate, dances, guitar playing, fake trumpet playing, and synchronized mechanical cars. Fabulous. I remembered all the talent shows I performed on camps as a child. We sang (the Spice Girls, Oh Ddddear), we danced (Tragedy, when the feeling’s gone…), and we did little skits. Anyway, we gave prizes to 3 groups who tied second and a winner. Last time we gave all the performer’s prizes and the winner a big prize. Oh but the disappointed on 2 little girl’s faces (who had in fact done a very good dance) almost broke my heart. I know that feeling, I remember the cold flush of disappointment. As adults we learn that we don’t want to handle disappointment and so we learn not to try unless we know we are very good (or ridiculous enough as the case may be). And it was agonizing as I felt I was teaching children that they must not try because they may not be the winner. Some children at a young age never want to try and some do and the fact that I have a hand in determining their attitude for the future is somewhat harrowing.

Oh silly decisions. One has to be so careful yet at the same time, sometimes one group has to win and someone has to lose. It is competition, the children learn English through competition. It is something I struggle with, that is, letting one child win over another but I still use competition consistently, to make my life easier as a teacher.

Oh but yet again my own education continues. About people, relationships. We are chucked into a camp with people you have never seen before and immediately you have to learn how to work together, who leads, who follows, who prepares, who …. Difficult. For the most part, I love the people I work with. In time, and not all the time. It is frustrating, I am frustrating, they are frustrating. When to work, when to relax, when you are relaxing and others are working. Life. people.

And, I am a person, I am not going to like all the children I teach. Sometimes they are too shy to talk to me and I don’t get much out of them and sometimes there is a child that is simply not my kind of person. For the first day of week one, 2 girls arrived from the South of Italy, they had sent their bags before them full to the brim with clothes for every outfit they may possibly need for the 2 weeks of Summer camp (I have lived out of a bag perhaps a third of the size since November) I surveyed these girls who were going to be in my class for 2 weeks and judged them as perhaps a bit, at least, an effort to entertain. Older children are an effort in general as these camps were not constructed for children 13 and over. By some weird brain function that I have going on my head this is the age I always ask to teach. Trying to make preteens who are too cool for school NOT too cool for school is, well, a challenge. And I judged these girls as such.

So I began every day with a stretching session. Reach for sky, reach for the ground. Honestly this was not for the children, this was for me I always forget to stretch, why not get paid for it? After a few days they learnt there was no point arguing as it was happening anyway and after a few more days when we were playing a general forfeit game they were running around tables 10 times with smiles on their faces, loving volleyball games and being blindfolded as their peers told them directions in English. Weirdly, these 13 year old girls with tons of makeup, fancy clothes and who don’t want to get dirty turned out to both possess fabulous hearts. I am 23 and I should know by now that fancy clothes and make up does not make a certain type of person. I should know that but again I find my perceptions judge first before I allow a pure judgement. Humbled, yet again. Teaching truly has taught me in these funny mountains that the children who at first frustrate me may end up being the ones I love the best.

Yes, exhaustion, learning and fun. The children exhaust us and they don’t sleep but then we get to play water games and drench the children in cold mountain water, there’s tennis day where I tan in the sun while the children get a tennis lesson and lake day when the children play in the lake while I focus on practicing my English (inappropriate jokes, sarcasm and the like) with fellow tutors and continue my tannig layers. Sometimes I walk on my hands and all the children start clapping like I am sort of upside down hero.

“We are young and free!” I shout in my morning routine. “No, Mary we are young but we are NOT frrree…ahhh, my mother…” one of my Southern Italy princesses says by way of explanation. I understand. Freedom is complicated. This is a mad life. An exhausted life. And maybe not a free life. But I am in the mountains in Italy. It is a good life.